Month: June 2011

Form masticates function or, to put it another way, function is the consumation of form. Yet design, too, is an illusion.You have to treat the dream like it’s not a dream – that’s when things really get interesting. Your margin for error is fourteen thousand.

How do percolators work? The morning breeze interacts with steam in a pleasing way. There is nothing new under the sun except microchips and processors. Look for a woman bearing candles and expect a new friendship.

Or teaching riding lessons to children maybe. Why is it that people in the country are always making camps for kids from the city? Can you possibly understand the function of a snake brain? More slim volumes of American poetry please!

Function derives from content, period. Study the zodiac with one hand behind your back. Welcome to the Harlem Camp For Kids Deprived of Traffic Sounds. What I am asking you is, do snakes remember anything?

You did not choose your form so how can you know your function? It turned out that my poetry was her waste of time. Quite a morning for ha ha’s, isn’t it? Now we’re both twenty sentences closer to death.

Earlier I cooked liver and sausage, hunting through the pantry for some raisins. She once said of herself, I can’t keep my damn mouth shut, can I? A gutted mouse on the trail, a stunned look in its black marbled eye. One can’t complain about orchards in a store that sells umbrellas, can they.

We all want to be supported in a way that measures our contribution. What would those German medieval theologians have to say about your struggle with low self esteem? We scattered pine boughs around the hen yard, hoping to minimize the odor. A door a day keeps relationships at bay.

And boiled coffee which, in order to make it drinkable, required so much sugar as to nearly become a syrup. I wonder if that park bench I slept on is still there, the one where I wrote those lines to you that I still love. The bottom of the sea has always struck me as useless pablum. I do remember holding hands in Albany and fighting the tears I knew were visible in the dashboard’s funky glare.

A Zen approach to exercise that one later decided defeated the point. At twilight, the laundry seems to glow. I asked God for an answer and got a fantasy to which the answer was merely a footnote. As you probably figured out, I’m drinking again.

The mud room was a repository for lost keys. He borrowed a tie for the tea party and later admitted that it was just to impress a girl. Illusions are no less troubling. Part of growing old means being willing to die by the railroad tracks alone.

There was never a forgiveness as when the red bird landed. We write not to say but to learn what to say. Queen Ann’s Lace everywhere and at last some Black-eyed Susans.

The kids read quietly, nearly invisible in the dusk. One sees a light, a flurry, and is changed forever. Or, as Bob Seger once sang, turn the page.

How can I approach enlightenment with tenacity and gravity when it’s so damned funny? The man in red robes raced by on a scooter, the look on his face one of pure delight. Joy is familiar but only just so.

The cardinal obscured itself in a tuffet of spring grass. Sodden streamers, fallen balloons. Earlier I talked you through the moment of your death, feeling as if I had just swallowed a whopping bolus of salt.

I meant love. We are the landing page we are looking for. So many flowers, so little time for field guides.

I guess I do long for a meaningful reflection. The mechanism of sympathy works quite well in you, doesn’t it? Authors paced the wall by the sea as the sun fell, watched by soldiers who were too young to understand anger.

Make of your heart a manger in Bethlehem. And beware of too many bean sprouts.

This is not your father’s legalese. We skated where the other struggled. An accepted opening strategy is castling, in which a line of three pawns can be thought of as a moat.

A linen disposition. A little spilled water. A cat in the window, dying.

Could we at least dispense with your opposition to the matriarchy? We chuckled behind root beer floats and vanilla coke. Tears welled in lieu of transformation.

God came and revealed me a tryptich. Why not put Gertrude Stein on the one dollar bill? We designed a bridge while munching soba noodles.

We’ve got to get around the importance of temples. Star-shaped clouds amidst cries of no. The baby goat bounced up to the bee hives, barked when stung, and bounced away crying.

Tunnels beget separation. The horse cleared its throat as if to say why doesn’t anybody ask me where the cart goes? Beavers worked through the night, heedless of the highway department’s recent purchase of explosives.

Your transformation is my old world map. A sodden mattress reeks of frog.

Animals like trails for the same reason we do: it’s easier going. Nobody talks about God anymore, at least not to my taste. Slimming the Queen down is what enables her to fly. Grace, grief, a touch of grappa.

Shambling bears drive the barn dogs insane. The grape arbor at last gives up its shadow. Doll’s eyes, buntings. Your sewing needle is my fictive seed.

What stage? We fiddled while talkative Pharisees challenged the resurrection’s particulars. Lost in the tall grass, thus out of mind. Any patch is evidence of soul.

Same shit, same day. She built a radio and the first song they heard was Donna Summer singing what was it called? Sniped oil cans, cigarette butts and a single undamaged owl feather. A dream, a stain, a falling in love with you.

A stag for every ewe. Not everything in life has its counterpart in chess. I build websites for businesses that are meant to fail. The road becomes a mess once traveled.

The lower button is undone. Thrumming of bees as we worked the hives lit ladders extending up to God. A single dandelion twice. Not books then but experience.

Perhaps the issue is one of faith vs. control. Perhaps we should visit a zoo eyes wide open. Freud’s maze. Seedlings taking flight, despite the rain.

Ornamental punctuation. Love is letting go of little Christmas trees. Revelation of belly buttons in lieu of the Divine. We worked quickly, fully-clothed, not talking.

A dream in which war was inevitable and only one man could stop it. Magicians filed slowly past the coffin sobbing. Goat’s milk ice cream, notes towards a Celtic diet. Brilliant pansies.

Brilliant fish circling the sky. Restless dogs nosing the underbrush, porcupines unsettled in sleep. She planted cosmos which I said was ironic and the gap in our marriage was thusly illustrated. Another beer, hey?

Hanging laundry while discussing the merits of tricycles. In the mud below wizened crab apples, a bear track. Oh how I love sleepovers.

There is a geometry to maybe. We who study the architecture of swing sets. While it rained I pulled out last year’s tomato stakes to assess their viability.

A wind bearing rain, a dog with a deer haunch dangling from its jaws. Board games scattered over the living room floor, an uncharacteristic mess. Sun so bright the road out appears white.

Coconuts, beach balls, salt smell of the sea! But what I really love is subtlety and nuance. Up all night writing notes toward a diet.

Ripe for a plunge, are we? She said later that a recollection of favorite kisses was imminent. My heart broke under the weight of metaphor.

Perhaps an essay exploring the reliability of cameras. Or a bird in the pines, invisible despite its soft insistent call. Adjectives, my undoing.

Forbidden you, forbidden us. At night a new dream, stark as an open fire.

We flipped through the grocery circular while thinking about bullets. Empty clothesline a few hours late. I am always spending money in ways that I shouldn’t. For days now, no birds have come to the feeder.

You are not not the tools with which you write. Spring apples are hard as marble. He looked down at my wife’s bra strap then at me. Later, salad, cheap wine and the last of the rhubarb baked in a pie.

There is always something else, the handling of which can be said to approximate God. We designed a tree house and never built it. Another family grew their own crystals. Let’s drive to Vermont and talk about it, okay?

Yet I like holding hands, there’s a sweetness to it, a simplicity. In my dream I was looking forward to a certain parade but positioned myself in a way that made viewing it difficult. There is always an orphan and, yes, a Meersman. We could strip the wallpaper, paint everything eggshell and then see about some hippie style stencils.

My love is a dog with lots of territory to guard. There is nothing like waking early in winter dark and reading the psalms by candle light. He left birthday cards up that were many years old. Forgiveness abounds.

The only way to handle so much fear is through repression yet the seams are obviously strained. My jaw aches and I hate dentists. Come down the ladder slowly, it’s the only way.

The long drive to New Jersey punctuated only by coughs. Plastic lawn furniture, wind chimes, robin shit near the garden. You were saying?

For what lies beyond the nightmare? Baroque semicolons, mavens of language. Wild roses sag in the rain.

I woke to write and yet each sentence bulged with the one I wouldn’t allow. Mismatched chairs a sign not of creativity but poverty and poverty is not a spiritual discipline anymore. You have to risk everything.

You want to wake up not write about waking up. We flipped through LPs, lost for what to talk about. Your flea market is my empty picture frame.

My board game? Consider rebuilding the stone walls all sinking and sagging around the farm. I’m thinking of shooting a moose again.

Once lovely, now just coffee. We invented our bodies for pride and pleasure and to attack other people so what did you expect?

Sentence sense. Images talking. The fine line between a dream and waking.

What you use to write is what writes. Clothes left out on the line overnight are wet in the morning if it rained in the night. Echolocation as failed literary theory.

Yet it does rain and the sentences do provide comfort. Dueling roosters made the last hours of sleep unbearable. Percolating coffee, a drunk drummer boy.

Take notes re: fauna. What you believe is what you teach. Always is not a kind word.

What emerges from ones and twos? Crossings? There is no relationship between chess and paragraphs.

Will it. While ignoring the obvious I found myself some shoes. A hankering to fiddle, to create, to go West when others are cool with a simple East.

To keep going beyond the period. We are always rewriting always.